The Talented Miss Highsmith

Evil she wrote and evil she was, or so Patricia Highsmith's detractors - and many they are - claim

Beautiful Shadow: A Life Of Patricia HighsmithBy Andrew WilsonBloomsbury, $69.95.

Belle Ombre is the name that Patricia Highsmith's immortal murderer and con man Tom Ripley gives his illegally acquired house in France, and Beautiful Shadow is the apt and resonant title Andrew Wilson has chosen for his exemplary biography of a tortured, difficult and outstandingly gifted human being.

Shadows, most of them decidedly unbeautiful, haunted Highsmith throughout her life. Five months before she was born, her mother, Mary Plangman, tried to get rid of her by drinking turpentine ("It's funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat," Mary would tell her years later) and nine days before her birth, her natural parents were granted a divorce. Patsy, as she was called as a child, was always uneasy in the company of her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, so it is surprising that she assumed his name when she became a writer.

Mary and Stanley left Fort Worth, Texas - Patsy's birthplace - for New York to increase their chances of work, but with the onset of the Depression in the late 1920s they headed home. On their second visit to New York they deposited Patsy with her maternal grandmother, Willie Mae Coates, and the young Highsmith experienced the first of many rejections.

Wilson writes of the anguished relationship between Mary and Patricia with a fine sense of balance, with the daughter craving love and respect from her unyielding mother for wearying decades. Mary became a Christian Scientist of a particularly blinkered and dogmatic kind, quoting the edicts of founder Mary Baker Eddy to a girl who wanted nothing more than simple maternal understanding. It proved a vain hope.

"Are you a les?" Mary asked 14-year-old Patsy, adding, "You are beginning to make noises like one" to make the insult cut deeper. No wonder the adolescent felt guilt and shame about her sexuality, and that her adult life would be spent in a continuous romantic search for the ideal partner. Even in old age, Mary seized every opportunity to chastise her turpentine-surviving and now famous offspring. Pat was a pervert, in her view, and the author of nasty books. There are those who shared that second judgement, some of them respected critics.

The world depicted by Patricia Highsmith with such clear-eyed precision is a godless place in which the intelligently wicked prosper while the ordinary and harmless perish. Wilson deftly traces her regard for the amoral and misanthropic back to her lonely formative years. Highsmith started reading books on psychology and psychopathology when she was 10, and from these she progressed to Nietzsche and other writers whose principal concern was the isolation of the individual.

With the publication, in 1950, of Strangers On A Train, discerning readers acknowledged at once that Highsmith was a serious novelist. In this brilliant debut novel, she creates one of the most complex of her varied assassins - Charles Anthony Bruno, the bored playboy with a determination to commit the perfect murder. Bruno is Tom Ripley in waiting, for where he fails Ripley succeeds.

Highsmith loved Ripley so much that she made him the hero (apt word) of five novels, starting with The Talented Mr Ripley and ending with Ripley Under Water. One of the reasons Highsmith was never as popular in her own country as she was in Europe is that many Americans simply couldn't stomach the notion of a charming, civilised murderer who always gets away with it. Ripley should have been sent to the chair a dozen times, but he is still here, still smiling.

Her relationship with Ripley was as close as if the pair were real-life friends.

"I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it," she wrote of one book, "and I was merely typing." When she won a prize, she added his name to hers on the certificate. Meanwhile, her flesh-and-blood friends were often treated to Ripley's attentions; a letter to one arrived from "Pat H, alias Ripley", while another received a book inscribed with the words "from Tom (Pat)".

The triumph of Wilson's study is that it induces sympathy for a woman who could be vicious and unpleasant on a scale that merits the term Strindbergian. Her countless love affairs - with an estimated three men and a legion of women - always ended in disasters of her own devising. She was a drama queen on the grand scale, though she met her hysterical match in Ellen Hill, a sociologist with a glacier for a heart. They were lovers for four years, but remained edgy friends for decades. An evening in their company would make a wreck of the average, mild-mannered guest, who seldom risked a return visit.

Highsmith, who died in 1995, was a liberal who nevertheless held anti-Semitic opinions, and a lesbian who considered the female the lesser of the species. She consumed an ocean of alcohol and was mean with money. Yet, out of the nightmarish details of her frustrated, itinerant existence, Wilson has fashioned a biography that does complete justice to her uneasy spirit. He lets both enemies and friends, admirers and detractors, have their say, and my, how these latter sound off. This is the story of someone who left both destruction and devotion in her wake, and who produced in The Talented Mr Ripley and its first sequel Ripley Under Ground and - my favourite - The Cry Of The Owl, three of the most disturbing, blackly comic novels of the last century.